This white chocolate cake is ideal for any celebration. It slices beautifully and so is easy to share!

When I started this blog, I promised to make all the cakes which feature in my first novel, Art and Soul. I’ve been slowly getting there, and today I’ve made the last one! If you want to see all the recipes, check out Sweet’s Cakes 🙂

In my book, a white chocolate cake with raspberry buttercream filling is made for the eighteenth birthday of one of the characters. Luckily for me, it turns out that this is the perfect cake for a party. It’s very rich, so your guests would probably be happy with a smaller slice and it cuts beautifully.

I made a bit of a mistake while baking this cake… but read this post and you can avoid the same slip up!

Put the chocolate, milk, sugar and butter in a pan and heat gently until all the ingredients have melted and combined to form a smooth mixture. Don’t let the mixture boil. Remove from the heat, pour into a bowl and leave to cool for 15 minutes.

In another bowl, beat the eggs together with the vanilla. Add the eggs to the cooled chocolate mixture and stir to combine.

In a large bowl, combine the flours, the bicarb and the baking powder. Gradually add the chocolate mixture to the flour, stirring as you go, until you have a smooth mixture.

Now this is where I went a bit wrong. Pour your mixture into your two tins trying to get roughly the same amount of mixture in each tin (if you want to be precise you can weigh the tins as you go). Make a tinfoil hat for each of your tins and cover the tins loosely, leaving plenty of space for the cake to rise.

Bake the white chocolate cakes for an hour. After thirty minutes, check how they’re cooking and change their position if necessary. You’ll know they’re done when you insert a knife into the middle of the white chocolate cakes and it comes out clean. Take your white chocolate cakes out of the oven, recycle your tinfoil and leave the cakes to cool in the tins for 15 minutes. Turn them out onto a wire rack to cool completely.

I didn’t make the tinfoil loose enough and it fell in the middle and touched the top of the cakes – argh!!! The way I’d lined the tins also backfired, with the greaseproof paper digging into the cake. I was rather annoyed with myself, particularly because the bake was otherwise rather nice. See:

Decoration

Due to my inability to line the tins correctly and make decent tinfoil hats for my cakes, the first thing I had to do was carve them into something acceptable. I cut a thin sliver off the top of both of them to make them level. Then I made a 18-cm diameter circle template (I drew round a saucer… you could be all technical and use compasses if you have them) from greaseproof paper, popped this on top of each of the cakes and used this as a guide to cut off the most uneven edges.

For the filling, I made raspberry buttercream. This is a basic buttercream recipe (75 g buttercream and 150 g icing sugar) with a tablespoon of raspberry purée. If you need more details, check out this recipe. You could either spread this between your white chocolate cakes using a knife, or pipe it. Once I’d sandwiched the cakes together, the result was what you see in the picture below on the far left.

For the crumb coat and final layer of icing I made another batch of buttercream. This was made from 100 g butter and 200 g icing sugar. I wanted to get it as white as possible and, after Googling “how to make buttercream white”, I used two techniques I’d picked up from various sources of baking wisdom. Using a mixer or hand beater, beat the butter for about 5 minutes, this will make it go paler. Then, when you’ve combined the icing sugar and butter, add a drop of purple food colouring. Honestly, this makes it whiter. Apparently it’s because purple is the opposite of yellow and goes some way to cancelling it out.

Finally I decorated the top of the white chocolate layer cake with red sugar sprinkle hearts. I made a mask from greaseproof paper to do this. And then I put some sugar butterflies and flowers around the edge.

The cake cuts beautifully and I was pleased with how even the top and bottom layers are:

The most surprising thing for me is that it really tastes like white chocolate. I know that sounds daft, but as white chocolate doesn’t taste of much, I was worried the cake wouldn’t have much flavour… but it does! 🙂

Awesome post! Your cake is so beautiful I’d be afraid to eat it. 😊 I’m a terrible baker. I can learn a few things from you. I’m doing a feature about my favorite blogs. Would you mind if I linked this post so everyone can see it?

Thank you very much and I wouldn’t mind at all – I would be honoured! 🙂
I have to take so many pictures before I cut into and “destroy” some of the things I’ve spent a long time making, but the deliciousness is always worth it!

Thanks! I love your pictures. Sometimes I read instructions and think, what are they talking about, but the way you do it makes it easy for some someone like me to follow along. I can imagine that must be so hard to destroy your art. It still looks beautiful and it’s making me hungry. 😊

The hardest bit is all the weighing out and then just keeping an eye on it to make sure it doesn’t burn! The decoration can be a bit more complicated, but it’s really unnecessary and you can skip it to just get to eat the cake quicker 🙂

Ooh that’s gorgeous! Do you think melting the chocolate, etc. in a double boiler would help keep it from boiling or does that not melt it enough (I’ve sometimes had trouble getting a completely smooth melted chocolate when using a double boiler)?

Thank you!
I think, in this case, as you have sugar you want to melt, it would be best to put the ingredients in a pan next to the heat. As you say, I think if they’re above heated water, they won’t get quite hot enough. It’s a shame though because it does mean you have to stand watching them the whole time they’re heating up and stirring to stop them from getting too hot!

Oh, I don’t know. I love scones 🙂
I think I make it sound as if there’s more cake in my book than there is! I was surprised when I went through that there were only 6 that I mentioned specifically. It’s probably a good thing though or I risk turning a novel into a recipe book 🙂

Yay! Just don’t make my mistake with the tinfoil 🙂 I think it was because I tried to cram the tins onto the same oven tray. Next time I think I’ll give them some more space. Still turned out delicious though!